ried Miss Brent out of sheer pique. It was a great escape for
her darling Lavinia. Roughhead is a most wild and dissipated young man,
one of Kicklebury's Christchurch friends, of whom her son has too many,
alas! and she enters into many particulars respecting the conduct
of Kicklebury--the unhappy boy's smoking, his love of billiards, his
fondness for the turf: she fears he has already injured his income, she
fears he is even now playing at Noirbourg; she is going thither to wean
him, if possible, from his companions and his gayeties--what may not a
mother effect? She only wrote to him the day before they left London
to announce that she was marching on him with her family. He is in many
respects like his poor father--the same openness and frankness, the same
easy disposition: alas! the same love of pleasure. But she had reformed
the father, and will do her utmost to call back her dear misguided boy.
She had an advantageous match for him in view--a lady not beautiful in
person, it is true, but possessed of every good principle, and a very,
very handsome fortune. It was under pretence of flying from this lady
that Kicklebury left town. But she knew better.

I say young men will be young men, and sow their wild oats; and think
to myself that the invasion of his mamma will be perhaps more surprising
than pleasant to young Sir Thomas Kicklebury, and that she possibly
talks about herself and her family, and her virtues and her daughters,
a little too much: but she WILL make a confidant of me, and all the time
we are doing the Rubens's she is talking of the pictures at Kicklebury,
of her portrait by Lawrence, pronounced to be his finest work, of
Lavinia's talent for drawing, and the expense of Fanny's music-masters;
of her house in town (where she hopes to see me); of her parties which
were stopped by the illness of her butler. She talks Kicklebury until I
am sick. And oh, Miss Fanny, all of this I endure, like an old fool, for
an occasional sight of your bright eyes and rosy face!

[Another parenthesis.--"We hope to see you in town, Mr. Titmarsh."
Foolish mockery! If all the people whom one has met abroad, and who
have said, "We hope to meet you often in town," had but made any the
slightest efforts to realize their hopes by sending a simple line of
invitation through the penny post, what an enormous dinner acquaintance
one would have had! But I mistrust people who say, "We hope to see you
in town."]

Lankin comes in a